Propeller arcade

This arcade cabinet has been saved from a gruesome death. [Oldbitcollector] picked the broken rig up for $50 and is building a Parallax Propeller based arcade machine. This began back in October and he’s just dropped in a newly painted control panel to replace the NES controller seen above. He pulled the replacement screen out of an old 19″ TV and found it to be a perfect fit. We didn’t find a complete list of available games but we know he’s got a menu system to choose the game and have seen Donkey Kong, Frogger, Defender, and at least one other in the videos. There’s less choices than a MAME cabinet but who needs more than a handful of the old 8-bit gems anyway?

That circuit doesn’t appear to be original, but the aluminum frame that the CRT is mounted in is definitely factory, as I used to have a few when I used to repair upright arcade machines years ago. Many commercial vendors have old cabinets(some with working monitor chassis and control panels) that they would be willing to part with if you just haul them off, or offer them a small amount of money. I traded a used HP replacement motherboard for two complete cabinets with six button control panels and eight-way joysticks a few years ago. In many 19″ cabinets, a 25″ CRT easily drops right in.

Call your local amusement vendors and see what they are getting rid of. I scored around 10 free arcade cabs in various states of disrepair, many fairly vanilla Jamma ones, but a few dedicated original cabs. I totally rebuilt the Wizard of Wor I got, and just need to repair the vector monitor the Asteroids that came with the lot.

Thanks for all the kind comments! I’m hoping to have this unit finished by the end of the month.
Just spend has night adding switches to the coin return to turn on/off the tv as well as reset the Propeller circuit.

This isn’t explained in the article, but it appears that there’s a community of people who rewrite these old titles for Propeller and this project sort of unites those versions in one project. And it appears that they rewrite them from scratch, not porting or emulating the originals. Sick! I like :D